Deploy and Host Dittofeed on Railway

Dittofeed is an open-source customer engagement platform — a self-hosted alternative to Customer.io, Braze, and OneSignal. Build segment-driven automated journeys with a visual editor, send templated messages over email, SMS, and webhooks, and keep every user event in your own infrastructure.

About Hosting Dittofeed

This template runs Dittofeed's lite bundle — API, dashboard, and worker in a single service — next to the three stores it needs: Postgres (app data), ClickHouse (user events and segmentation), and Temporal (journey orchestration, using the same Postgres). Database migrations and the initial workspace bootstrap run automatically on first boot. Authentication is single-tenant: one shared login guarded by the generated PASSWORD template variable, with sessions signed by SECRET_KEY.

Common Use Cases

Lifecycle email journeys (onboarding drips, win-backs, upgrade nudges) without per-contact SaaS pricing
Product-event-driven messaging — segments computed from the events your app already emits
Keeping customer PII and behavioral data in your own infrastructure for GDPR or policy reasons

Dependencies for Dittofeed Hosting

PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and Temporal — all included as services in this template
An email provider for actual sending (SendGrid, Amazon SES, Resend, Postmark, or raw SMTP), connected in Settings after deploy

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

Your Dittofeed dashboard lives at the lite service's Railway domain (it redirects to /dashboard). Sign in with the PASSWORD template variable.

Service	Role
dittofeed	API + dashboard + worker (`dittofeed-lite`)
postgres	App data + Temporal's persistence
clickhouse	User events, segment computation; volume at `/var/lib/clickhouse`
temporal	Journey/workflow engine (`auto-setup`, dynamicconfig baked in)

After deploy:

Sign in and open Settings → Message Channels to connect your email provider (API key or SMTP).
Send events via the Dittofeed API or SDKs using a write key from Settings.
Build a segment, a template, and a journey — then activate it.

Notes:

BOOTSTRAP=true re-checks the workspace on every boot; it's idempotent. You can set it to false after the first successful deploy for slightly faster restarts.
ClickHouse is the memory-hungry piece — give it ~2 GB for comfortable segment computation.
The dashboard's API base is derived from the Railway domain automatically; set DASHBOARD_API_BASE yourself if you attach a custom domain.

Why Deploy Dittofeed on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Dittofeed on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.